Celebrating Women

So much depends
on having good friends.
Unlike the sunflower,
we women need to build,
bubbling with superpower,
yet yearning to feel fulfilled.
We ponder, paint, plan,
imagine, dream, create,
extend friends a hand
and help them celebrate.
Like the golden sunflower,
we bloom with power.

Notes: Despite the brightness of the photo (taken at Whole Foods while waiting for a blueberry-kale drink) today is gray-skies, white snow and downed tree limbs. We’re fortunate to have power. Half our neighbors don’t. The kids are enjoying their snow day, howling with laughter and planning to celebrate sledding with brownies.

Writing Tips: A MicroSonnet rhymes in twelve lines: couplet, two quatrains, couplet, although #microsonnet on twitter has many form variants. This particular poem is also a bouquet vignette. A vignette is a short, impressionistic piece that sketches a scene or evokes emotion anchored by comparisons to an idea, character, theme, setting or object. Prose vignettes can be under 1,000 words. Vignette poems are as short as they need to be. For my poem, it’s a comparison to a sunflower, thus “bouquet vignette.”

Happy Poetry Friday! Thanks to Michelle H. Barnes at Today’s Little Ditty for hosting. Michelle has collected together strategies for teaching poetry to all ages from personal experience and from generous poet-teacher-friends who shared their techniques. Any one of the ideas would be a good place to start your writing day, even if you are just kick-starting your own writing.

I’m so grateful for my PF friends and that they “extend friends a hand” filled with flowers and poetry. I love your poem and loved learning about MicroSonnets. Sonnets have always eluded me, but I think I’d like to give this a try. Thank you for sharing, Brenda!

hi there cute Brenda , it is me Ernesto again lol. Listen , i was wondering if you can give me some tips on how to get better my blog website on wordpress as similar as yours , very nice by the way . i hope to hear from you soon. Ernesto

ooooooh, a microsonnet! and a bouquet vingnette…I love the idea of these! I’ve copied the form tips down and aim to give them a try. Thanks not only for the introduction to them but a gorgeous sample of a bouqet vignette. I love it! And, the grocery store sunflower, sound of kids home on a snow day combined with sledding mess and brownies gives me the best kind of smile. YOu are and awesome woman and mom. Thanks for sharing.

Liked learning about this form. My favorite lines: “extend friends a hand and help them celebrate” – because it is hard to celebrate alone, and true friendship isn’t jealous! A wonderful reminder – and probably a good poster for a classroom!

Thanks for the introduction to microsonnet! I, too, have found that supermarket flower sections are great for getting shots in the dead of winter! I once snapped pictures of hot peppers in the produce section of Market Basket!

Amen! And thanks for introducing me to the “micro sonnet.” I like how you opened this poem with the famous line from WCW from almost 100 years ago, and yet this poem goes in a completely different direction.

I love WCW. That poem has entered my fiber, I think. Why white chickens? Maddening until I remember he visited his patients. Were those white chickens essential to their very survival? Did that red wheelbarrow take the eggs for sale? It’s so mysterious and resonate a poem, despite my knowing so little about it. 🙂

Hi Michelle, I think a microsonnet is right up your alley. Kat called it a bouquet vignette, which was new to me. I looked that up and updated my post with a definition. She was right. It is a bouquet vignette, which I think is also right up your alley. I may have to explore some of those other micro forms, too. 🙂

Now I had to look up bouquet vignette. I am so excited to learn something new. The first page of google had nothing good defining a bouquet vignette although there is a good listing of them on Hello Poetry. I may have to update my post. Thanks!

Oh my. I didn’t know there was such a thing as a bouquet vignette! I just thought that was an appropriate way to describe a photo of a sunflower within a larger bouquet – and a bouquet of words for women. 🙂

Thanks, Michelle. #Microsonnets are popular on twitter, although I only discovered that when I checked to see if anyone else had done a microsonnet. I thought I was making it up at first. Someone else got there first, though, as usual. On twitter, it seems like anything that combines quatrains and couplets is called a “#microsonnet”.

Reblogged this on By the Mighty Mumford and commented:
ORT-ORT-ORT–A WISE Man once said–“I’m rarely a leader of men, but will always be an avid fan of women!” Take it however you wish. I consider this a compliment! 🙂